If you want to learn how to write fresh nonverbal communication, read THE SLEEPING DOLL by Jeffery Deaver.   This book features Special Agent Kathryn Dance, a kinesics specialist.  She’s an expert in interpreting body language. 

Here are two excerpts from page 335.  The kinesics specialist is talking to a reluctant witness, a teenage girl. 

     “Tare, something troubling happened on the drive, didn’t it.?”

     “Troubling?  No.  Really.  I swear.”

     A triple play there:  two denial flag expressions, along with answering a question with a question.  Now the girl was flushed and her foot bobbed again, an obvious cluster of stress responses.

SEVERAL LINES LATER:

     Finally she said, “Oh, I‘ve wanted to tell somebody.  I just couldn’t.  Not the counselors or friends, my aunt . . .”  More sobbing.   Collapsed chest, chin down, hands in her lap when not mopping her face.  The textbook kinesic signs that Theresa Croyton had moved into the acceptance stage of emotional response.  The terrible burden of what she’d been living with was finally going to come out.  She was confessing.

WOW!  Jeffery Deaver has his protagonist teach the reader about body language.  Convenient.  Compelling.  Masterful. 

Those of you who’ve taken my editing courses or heard me present full-day workshops know about EMOTIONAL HITS.  Look how many Emotional Hits Deaver slips in that last paragraph.  Sobbing.  Chest.  Chin.  Hands/lap.  Hands/mopping face.  FIVE Emotional Hits, plus the dialogue, plus the internalizations.  NOTE that he backloaded the paragraph with CONFESSING.    :-)))

Treat yourself to a fabulous read loaded with classic Deaver plot twists.  Treat yourself to learning more about interpreting body language than you knew existed.

Read Jeffery Deaver.  Treat yourself.